To take advantage of opportunities/solve problems, the need for a greater than local/cross-boundary approach can be seen. Regional cooperation is the nominal tool, yet the goal is to be greater; have greater capacity, resources, market,…. Greater is regional; working across boundaries achieves it. Cooperation is possible when people recognize such regional community. This is regional intelligence: Greater Communities solving problems, of which security is foremost; altogether “community motive.”

Multi-jurisdictional
intentional regional communities are, in all cases, “Greater Communities” where
“community motive” is at work at a more than a local scale. This newsletter
provides a scan of regional community, cooperation and collaboration activity
as reported in news media and blogs.

The Malloy administration Friday announced $8.6 million
in grants to promote regional planning and economic development.

"These grants are an investment in less expensive
government — government absolutely must do more with less," Gov. Dannel P.
Malloy said in a written statement. "Using improved technology to reduce
costs and taking a collaborative approach to providing local services meets the
needs of residents in a smarter way."

More than $7 million of the money went to regional
councils and planning agencies for Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) , or
standardized mapping, systems to better coordinate disaster response..

In addition are the following grants, listed by amount,
who gets it, and why: …

The regional grant initiative, under the Regional Performance
Incentive Program, is administered by the state Office of Policy and
Management. ...

…anyone who sees the Atlanta vote as an indication that
Americans won't pay for transportation should take a look beyond the state's
capital city. Lost in much of the analysis about the failure of the tax hike in
Atlanta -- and most of the state's other 12 transportation districts too -- was
the fact that it actually passed in three of them.

…

In Region 7 -- anchored by the city of Augusta and
Richmond County -- Mayor Deke Copenhaver says officials who assembled the
project list stuck to mostly nuts-and-bolts work like road resurfacing and
widening. "(W)e didn't go with any of the major, sexy projects that would
be a lightening rod for controversy."

Regional officials say a key reason the vote was successful
in the three regions was because the lists were kept relatively short. "'I
think people got their hands around it," says Teresa Tomlinson, mayor of
Columbus, which is a merged city with Muscogee County.

In Columbus' Region 8, there were only about two dozen
projects, which some proponents say was manageable and could be easily conveyed
to voters, unlike the list assembled for greater Atlanta.

3. A recent "territorial review" published by the
Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development assessing the
Chicago tri-state metropolitan area was the impetus for the July 17 conference
"Milwaukee's Future in the Chicago Megacity."

…

Milwaukee Water Council and its members are working with
the Tri-State Alliance for Regional Development to create an integrated
aquaponics ecosystem that would involve
raising fish and growing vegetables year-round in enclosed buildings.

It is also participating in an application for the
Economic Development Administration's 2012 i6 Challenge with the Chicago-based
Clean Energy Trust. …

One idea of regional collaboration is clusters in the
region playing the role of broker between the tri-state region universities,
companies and governments, not just for commercialization but for innovation
and entrepreneurship, to achieve greater regionwide effectiveness and to
maximize the potential for national and international market penetration.

…

The Water Council's work is an on-the-ground example of
how well this approach can work.…

This collaboration between different parts of the
tri-state area is the driving force behind its economic development and
viability on a global stage. At the Water Council, we know that we compete on
the global stage with three other global players: Singapore, the Netherlands
and Israel. The only way we can be globally competitive is to work with our
regional neighbors to commercialize our research and ideas and to market to the
world.

…

The time has come for our regions to put aside our
differences and, through our clusters, come together to form a globally
competitive tri-state region.

SAVANNAH’S MAYOR and council have it exactly right when
it comes to pollution in the Ogeechee River. What happens upstream affects
things downstream.

Since Savannah and Chatham County are about 70 miles
downriver from the King America Finishing plant implicated in last summer’s
massive fish kill, it’s natural that Savannah City Council go on record and
demand that state officials do a better job of protecting the river.

It’s also responsible government.

Indeed, the Chatham County Commission should take a
similar stand. So should all county governments downriver from the plant,
located in Screven County. That includes the Effingham County Commission, Bryan
County Commission, Liberty County Commission and Bulloch County Commission.

…

“We need to work together as a region…

Mr. Bordeaux is a former state lawmaker who knows how
Georgia government works.…

A good way to get the governor to pay attention to what
his EPD is doing is to show that the Ogeechee matters to citizens & local
government.

Thousands of tons of textiles will soon be diverted from
the local waste stream in the Philadelphia region - Bucks, Montgomery,
Northeast Philadelphia and Southern Lehigh - thanks to an innovative agreement
between textile recycler Community Recycling of Fairless Hills and George Leck
and Son Inc., a family-owned and operated waste hauling company based in
Ivyland.

In this curbside program, homeowners will be able to
recycle clothes and related soft items, paired shoes, bags/belts, known as textiles.

… Adding textile recycling with Community Recycling
makes total sense both ecologically and economically.”

According to the U.S. EPA, 85 percent of all discarded
textiles – over 11 million tons – are sent to U.S. landfills every year.
Community Recycling is an environmentally-conscious textile recycling company
that collects unwanted textiles and related materials that are responsibly
distributed for reuse, resale and recycling in the US and abroad.

A spirit of collaboration and public-private partnership
has set the stage for the western PA-eastern Ohio-northern West Virginia “Tech
Belt” to lead the way in revitalizing American manufacturing. The White House
announced…Department of Defense will provide $30 million to establish a
National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute in Youngstown, Ohio. The
federal grant will be matched with about $40 million by the winning consortium
from our region.

Additive manufacturing, often referred to as 3D
printing, is a promising new way of making products and components.…

TechBelt Initiative…region…stretches from Cleveland to
Pittsburgh to Morgantown, represents the 10th highest GDP in the U.S.

This federal grant is a big victory for this
“mega-region” because it validates the significance of our world-class
concentration of manufacturing expertise and academic research. It puts us on
the map for corporations and investors looking for the places that are driving
innovation in the country.

The great industrialist Henry Ford once said,
"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working
together is success." And so it is with economic development.
Collaboration and teamwork always yield greater results than working alone.

As a regional economic development marketing
organization, North Louisiana Economic Partnership (NLEP) never works on a
project alone. It always collaborates with state and local partners to recruit
or help businesses to expand in the 14 northern Louisiana parishes it serves.
That's why NLEP's tagline is "Together We Achieve More."

…

The merger between two local economic development groups
to create one regional group, NLEP, represents the first phase of "coming
together."…

Case in point: The collaboration across the corridor
between Louisiana Tech University in Ruston and Cyber Innovation Center in
Bossier City produced a program so successful that it has been selected for a
national rollout this summer. The Cyber Discovery model is a professional
development program that mentors high school teachers while encouraging
students to pursue an education and careers in science, technology, engineering
and math: the STEM subjects. …

Middle Georgia leaders like to talk about regional
cooperation, but on Friday they put their talk into action.

The county commission chairmen of Bibb, Houston and
Peach counties signed an agreement that spells out how each will allocate funds
toward resolving encroachment.

That’s the term for residential properties in the area
north of Robins Air Force Base considered at risk for crashes and high noise
levels. Officials are looking to buy 250 parcels to clear out the homes.

Brad Fink, chairman of the 21st Century Partnership,
said encroachment is the top reason bases are closed. The partnership is a
community organization that works to promote the military value of Robins,
particularly during a BRAC.

“As we sign this today, we will start looking at
encroachment as an issue in the rearview mirror, which is great for Robins Air
Force Base,” Fink said.

A B.C government transit review panel calls for improved
representation for Greater Victoria's transit service, saying the status quo
does not allow for efficient regional planning.

The three-member review panel spent five months
reviewing B.C. Transit and its relationship as the government's contractor for
province-wide transit services.

The report, released Tuesday, considers three options
for improving the existing governance model for the Victoria Regional
Transportation Commission. A review of the commission does not favour the
current model of having just seven representatives from five municipalities
making decisions for the whole region.

Members considered two other options, including a
transit takeover by the Capital Regional District as well as increasing the
size and role of the current commission to improve representation throughout
the region.

The study of Greater Victoria's system is part of a
province-wide analysis of transit ...

I was prompted by a post on the Smithsonian blog a few
months ago to go back to read The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. The
Smithsonian post had evaluated the Limits’ 1972 main case projections against
actual consumption to 2000, and found them impressively close. Since the most
common outcome of the model is “overshoot and collapse”, in a bit more than a
decade’s time, it seemed a good idea to understand it a bit better. Quotes and
page numbers are from the 30-Year Update edition, published by Earthscan in
London in 2005.

The argument of Limits to Growth is built on a model,
World3, which has evolved over time, and all models are simplifications.
Specifically, it is a systems dynamics model, built around notions of stocks,
flows and sinks. Systems models also include delays, which are sometimes poorly
understood by economists and technologists – who were among the noisiest
critics of the original Limits to Growth book – because their mental and
theoretical models assume rapid corrections to systems shortfalls.

A survey released Wednesday by researchers at the
University of North Carolina found that despite the many challenges they face,
the nation's lowest-income individuals are nonetheless thankful they don't have
to endure the unique hardships of the nation's long-suffering middle class.

According to the report, the 46 million Americans who
fall below the federal poverty line, though struggling mightily, are at least
glad they don't have to live up to some rapidly vanishing American dream of
advancing in their career, making more money, and improving their lifestyle,
the way their middle-income counterparts do.

"The unrealistic expectations and false hope they
experience must be unbearable," Camden, NJ hotel clerk Allison Jacobsen
told researchers, noting that while her $22,000 annual salary barely covers her
rent and groceries each month, at least she doesn't operate under the flawed
assumption that her situation will ever improve. "A life spent constantly
stressing out over a dead-end job or struggling to pay off a fixed 30-year
mortgage on a continuously depreciating three-bedroom townhouse? It's
horrific."

The system is based on a geocode scheme set up for earth that focuses on established political boundaries as a basis for regional grouping of nations, states and localities. It is decimal system based to take advantage of the sort criteria for numbers in computers. It utilized the Sector Group and Region codes of the United Nations and ISO. Geographic information system technology does not solve the problem, but its tools can be used with the geocodes.

The geocode system effectively organizes Wikipedia entries as a library management and the geocodes can be used for data aggregation. This has been developed under a Creative Commons license and would benefit from a global network implementation where local users cooperatively related subnational geographic regions and component political geography.

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Earth ( we know its a spherical whole)

Humanity's Local Planet

Universe Man at the Boundary

Local Planet - Regional Space

Our Local Planet has systems of Political Geographies which combine as Regional/Greater Communities

Universe Man's place on earth is local and regional silmultaneously depending upon the system of regions, sub-regions of the planet as local wholes: continents, nations, states, provinces, districts, counties, shires, municipalities. etc., which have local regions within and between them which are capable of being greater communities at many scales.

Based on my experience as a regional planner and agency director, 1973 -2008, and in recognition of emerging "regional communities," I developed three thoughts about community that relate to the challenge of working across-boundaries as greater or regional communities. The thoughts/theses apply for communities at the scale of bonding or bridging social capital as defined by Robert D. Putnam, which is alternately local or regional. (link below)

As of 2011, considering the global financial crisis brought about by pursuit of the "profit motive," it struck me that this has come to dominate modern life. This is a relatively new invention of civilization and wasn't a concern for most of the time that homo sapiens has been on the planet.

The three thoughts below that had emerged in my experience of working on regional cooperation now represent what I now posit as the "community motive." Concern about "profit" can emerge within an established community over time, but, to my mind the "profit motive" does not exist in the wild.

1) Community precedes cooperation.2) Community is how life solves all problems.3) Security is the primary purpose of community.

These three thoughts, theses if you will, are the basis of the "community motive." Following is some exposition about each one.

As I see it, security has always been the priority for humans since the plains of Africa. That's why communities first seek to establish defensible boundaries. After the basics are in place, security focus shifts to the social and economic. Boundaries work like the membrane in the osmosis experiment most of us have seen in a science class. The membrane is a filter that lets the good things pass through, but keeps unwanted things out. (Osmosis -YouTube - 45 sec.)

The evolved political boundaries of today have consequence. The rules change when you cross them. Though marked on the ground and fortified in some instances, they are conceptual, as pictured above, with Universe Man. The boundary divides the space between local, that within, and regional, everything outside, as labeled in the second panel. The third panel repeats the image within, to show, without graphic elegance, that the land on which Universe Man sits is regional at another scale, as determined by other boundaries, and another area that's local. A territory is both local and regional, depending upon the perspective.

Communities of communities, “regional communities” are greater communities organized to solve a problem, be it managing a watershed, strengthening an economic cluster or ensuring peer competition for school sports. Regional boundaries can be imposed for administrative purposes within states, but for these to be a basis for effective cooperation, a greater community sense is needed for that geography among the people. This is true for multi-state and multi-national regional communities as well. The leaders with such a vision can build a regional community by finding that which is already in place.

This is not to suggest that community is easy to build in order to solve problems. In a crisis, humans of any culture, belief or politics can quickly come together and self-organize to save themselves and others. It was the on-the- ground response to the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated to me the deep responsiveness of human community, as well as the fundamental importance of security. Community is how humans have always survived. This, I think, extends to all life forms.